Imagine coming home after a long trip away. Everything is just as you left it as you approach your door, covered by an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. It feels right, it smells right, you're truly, finally home. But when you open the door, you notice immediately, something is off. The legs of your dining room table are all different sizes. The lights have an odd tint to them. Your wife repeats the same three lines of dialogue often. The floor seems to be covered in invisible tar. Your staircase causes your knee to give out whenever you use it, which isn't painful but it is kind of embarrassing and makes you not want to use the stairs. Everything is just very SLIGHTLY off. But it's still home, so you go through it, and then people tell you that the final boss of your home will be horrible and you remember him being horrible but he's not that bad if you nail the shortcut on two laps and honestly it's not that hard of a shortcut, Jungle Boogie's felt less consistent at least this one you have a vertical leap for.

That is the experience of playing Crash Nitro Kart. Everything about this game is so very close to being excellent - not even "as CTR was", just excellent on its own merits - but everything is very SLIGHTLY off. Ideas like frenzy and anti-gravity are super cool and exhilarating, but lose novelty and both distract from the act of racing with some odd stiffness. The lines you take have less of a natural curve, making the relic races simultaneously more slippery whilst requiring more precision. Track design is inspired at times, but the geometry of the levels causes you to bonk and lose speed more often than is necessary. There are some solid items, but computer racers NEVER hit traps, so you're just kinda left to avoid your own stuff and suffer as wumpa crate drops have been nerfed across the board. You have to beat the game twice, 100%, to actually finish it. And everything is just a biiiit too slow, causing races to drag on far longer than they should (something Nitro Fueled would later prove by letting you blaze through some of these tracks).

There is an INCREDIBLY fun game in here with a fantastically high skill ceiling, but every single step of the way there is a small problem or annoyance eating at this game's heels that keeps it from achieving everything it wants to, and they add up. It's a fascinating experience and I'm a Big Norm fan through and through (the fact that I can't play as him is tragic), the team clearly did their homework to see what made CTR work, but this needed either more budget or more time in the oven than what the publisher was willing to afford it. At least it has the fastest reset in the world; they knew some of those CNK Challenges would be miserable bits of trial and error.

What a fun, cute little game to learn. Very much in the vein of "get yourself out of unwinnable enemy patterns", with the added bonus of Sonson's movement being restricted to rather rigid platforming, a comfortable auto-scroll, and a rather short range of attack. Due to this, baiting enemy patterns is simultaneously more simplified as their patterns have less diagonals, and more harrowing as you have less of an ability to properly avoid them. It functions as it should, and that's neat! Very nice and replayable!

This game is utterly inexplicable. It's got an incredibly unfriendly front end where you kind of just bash your head against farming and church work until your daughter can do stuff consistently, is a bit gross and very "written in 1993" in places, has a certain stiffness to it, and you kind of lose steam at the end regardless of what route you take as you're just grinding out stats... but it's intoxicating being in the middle of it. Time melts away as every tiny, incremental bit of the game adds up, a massive list of options opening up more and more, finally unlocking themsleves as you puzzle together just how to get through the game. I'm not sure what I can say to the game's overall quality, but in spite of its age, the addictive nature of slow-burn building is just GOOD in this game. Its pace actively works to its advantage in making every small thing, every errant little discovery, that much more special. Not for everyone, but I think it's a game that should definitely be studied, at the very least!

Some might say that this is a silly Mario Sports game. That it is a disposable title, made to be a good gift to get the kids in 2005 and then quickly be forgotten. It fulfills a quota of getting Mario out there to play all of the sports. No. This is what all baseball games aspire to be. When you're not just considering pure statistics, trajectories, timing. It's about managing resources. It's about counterpicking your opponent to take away their resources. It's about building a team to field all of your positions to best counteract everything your opponent can do. Mario Baseball starts at the character select screen, and continues on as a game of constant wagers between you and your opponent, calling bluffs to use your star powers to ensure runs, or faking your opponent out to make them whiff their opportunities. Of loading a lineup full of killers to force them to walk Bowser, only to immediately follow him up with Birdo who injects chaos into the ballfield. And then you actually hitting the ball and pitching and stuff feels pretty good, too. By far the deepest system of any of the Mario spin-offs, and it's got Pianta. I love that guy, he's stupid!

There is less lag on this game than Tetris Attack, and also a bigger window to extend combos after clearing blocks (by a few frames). Therefore, it is very good.

This is the best puzzle game at being a fighting game. Agonizing wars of attrition, planning needing to be compensated by resource management - it does not compare to Tetris, because it does not want to be Tetris. It does not want to be infinite. It simply wants you to be better. You CAN be better. And when you're better the man will say "When you're hot you're hot" while playing a MIDI piano version of a power ballad from a 4Kids album from the early 2000's. And is that not the peak of human existence?

You can talk about the game's immaculate sprite work, brutal difficulty, how much replay value it realistically should have, how much of it is a scam to just get you to keep slamming quarters in a machine, how much a one-hour game can truly be "great" going off of just pure run 'n' gun gameplay.

Or we can sit here and talk about how the final level is the length of three levels combined, starts at an insane climax and only goes up from there in one of the most incredible marathons of a final sprint games have to offer. I will go with the latter, there is never a time where I bring someone through this game's final mission and their jaw is not on the floor.

There are some arcade machines that, if I see it in an arcade, I have to play it at least once. Dance Dance Revolution Extreme is one of them. This, recently, has become the other. The absolute thrill of this control scheme, sliding your fingers across the digitized keyboard, the piano track that goes in and out depending on your ability to actually hit the notes - this is the experience of a game like Guitar Hero, but with the full bodied involvement that simulates every cartoon pianist you've ever seen going to town, sliding up and down the machine to reach every note. And its focus on classical music, Japanese pop, and Beatmania soundtracks allows it to have a natural curve of altogether familiar songs into what would be expected out of a Konami rhythm game into testing the limits of the concept. For an arcade experience, I think this combines the absolute best in presentation, skillful execution, and growth from play to play that the rhythm genre has to offer. Strongly recommend looking out for it if a con has an arcade!

Overall, I believe what defines this experience is your ability to play with the idea of choices - if you like picking options from a menu to see various permutations, the game is a pure service to that, with the reward being rather excellent variances in voice acting. It is a game made for a VERY specific kind of person, whose favorite part of every RPG is a dialogue wheel, and enjoys playing with just how much or how little freedom you get with having that dialogue wheel. If that, plus some fun, disturbed imagery is absolutely your jam, this is a game that perfectly serves your interests. If you're into a more constructed narrative where there's distinct meaning in the story itself rather than what you make of it, or simply enjoy the finality of an ending and actually having all of the information you need to have proper closure, the game intentionally avoids that. I fall somewhere closer to being fully engrossed during my playthrough, but have little impact walking away from it. Consider this review a sales pitch for the game; if it sounds interesting to you, and you hear a trailer and you're like "oh that Jonathan Sims sounds fun to listen to", then go for it!

I am a champion boxer I am the best at getting punched in this game.